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consumer capitalism, which is one reason why the United States is among the most godly
places on earth, as well as one of the most profane.
The balance between engagement and detachment, however, is a hard one to strike. In
the States, it tends to tip on the one side towards total immersion, as people triumphantly
consume seventy-eight hot dogs in two minutes flat, and on the other side towards a with-
drawal from the flesh altogether. In a familiar narcissism, the body becomes an object you
carry around with you like some priceless, sickeningly fragile vase. What to put inside it
becomes as fraught an issue as what to put in your will. Many of the well-off eat sparingly,
which is the only bond they have with the poor. You care for your body not because you
love it, but as you might attend to some temperamental beast which is capable of turning on
you and savaging you at any moment. There are those who react to being offered an aspirin
as though they are being handed a tarantula.
Eating and drinking are acts of transgression, as the purity of one's inner space risks be-
ing polluted by a messy material world. The body acts as the symbolic threshold between
the two. Poised ambiguously between the two realms, it is fully at home in neither. The
body is an ambiguous zone in any case. If it is what binds us to others, it is also what walls
us off from them. You can let it run to seed, secure in the knowledge that the real you is
buried deep within it (“What matters is what's inside you”). Or you can punish and puri-
fy it by running thirty miles a day, converting it into a steel-hard instrument of your will.
Either way, the true self is disembodied. It has no truck with the degenerate flesh. The real
you is either so deep within the body as to be no part of it, or it manipulates it from a lofty
distance.
On Purity and Poison
At worst, a fear of transgression can result in the misery and occasional tragedy of eating
disorders, though there are many other ways of accounting for such ailments. It is not, of
course, that all those afflicted by such disorders are possessed by the manic will. It is rather
that, as Freud knew, there is a psychopathology of everyday life, in which the behaviour
of those who are ill and unhappy serves to write large the malaise of a whole civilisation.
Western civilisation as a whole has a pathological relation to the material world, of which
food and the body are palpable signs. The metaphor of invasion is to be found everywhere
in America, from eating to Al Qaeda. An American physician I know was taught in medical
school that the way to make real money was to “invade the body.” What the British know
as burglary is sometimes called home invasion in the United States.
That Americans are overweight is a stale cliché, but it is perhaps less hackneyed to note
that one reason for this is their parochialism. Many of them have no idea that the planet is
not populated by people just like themselves. Nor could some of them fit into the aircraft
seats that might allow them to find out. Admittedly, it is not as though they would instantly
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